Cairo: Errands and Rumors

The list of things to do has been backing up recently, and so this afternoon I endeavored to check them off in my neighborhood, Zamalek, a leafy upscale island in the middle of the Nile. At every stop I made, I asked, “So what do you think about the news about Osama bin Laden?”

“I don’t really care,” said a chauffeur waiting by the curb. “I’m not happy or upset, but if there’s something that bothers me, it’s that they dumped his body in the sea, because every Muslim has a right to a proper funeral.”

The disquiet over the disposal of the body was echoed by three men, traders, sitting out on the street, whiling the afternoon. “Of course we’re upset, because he’s a Muslim, and one of our brothers.” Based on my experience, most Egyptians do not condone Osama’s violence, but a good many see him as somehow on their side and the Americans on the other.

The manager in the money-changing office, who had a prayer callus on his forehead—popular among the conservative class of the Egyptian petit bourgeois—and the short bristle mustache and long beard of a fundamentalist, said he didn’t believe Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on 9/11; it was more likely Mossad and the C.I.A. He had also heard somewhere that a twelve-year-old daughter of Osama bin Laden had witnessed the raid and had an account that differed from the official story. Misinformation, rumor, counter-rumor, and conspiracy theories are always the currency of the conversations in the shops and the coffee houses and the alleys. “Did you hear that Saddam Hussein is still alive?” the money changer went on. I was not sure if he was joking or not, but he explained that he had seen on TV that a German cosmetic surgeon had said that it was his double who was killed: “No one knows where the truth is.”

I walked past the “Osama Style” hairdresser to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy. The pharmacist didn’t really believe the official American version, either. “It’s just about Obama getting himself popular,” he said, handing me a tube of cream with a smile. “It’s the same thing as with Saddam. Every so often they kill someone—I am not saying Saddam and bin Laden were right, they were both wrong, but it’s the way Americans treat Arabs and Muslims, this is what upsets me.”

The man in the gun shop—sales for personal-protection handguns, legal with a license, are up in these uneasy interim times—said he believed the Americans: “Why would they lie?” But the devout man helping me find a stove lighter in the kitchen-supply store said, “Only God knows.”

“Of course it’s a catastrophe!” said his boss by the till. “He’s a Muslim like us, and they cut off his head”—he had no evidence for this—“and dumped his body in the sea and then took the head to the Pentagon to show it off.”

“Is there any good way to kill someone?” the devout vendor asked simply.

“Humph,” said his boss, handing me change. “Even if it is true, he died as a martyr, like Sadat.” (Ironically, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President, was assassinated by religious extremists in 1981; Mubarak succeeded him.)

I went to ask about getting some pictures framed, and the framer (also sporting a prayer callus, but as my Egyptian friends remind me, you can’t really judge a man by a prayer callus; some people use a scouring pad to rough it up and coffee to stain it) said that the whole affair sat uneasily with him. “You can’t create something and then destroy it,” he said.

“So the Americans created Osama?” I asked.

“Yes, the Americans created him to frighten people and then destroyed him to look like heroes.”

The tailor, who seemed like a wise man, didn’t want to talk too much about it. “But the T word,” he said, alluding to terrorism, “won’t stop.” The Christians in a liquor store called Drinkies (the only one in Zamalek; no new licenses to sell alcohol have been issued in Egypt, they told me, in decades; existing shops are grandfathered in) were the only people I met who seemed really glad about the news. “I’m happy about it,” said one.

“If it’s true!” cautioned his colleague.

I bought several bottles of Egyptian red wine made with imported Syrah grapes. On the way home, I stopped at a newsstand. Osama was on a couple of front pages, but so were pictures of the regimists now in jail on corruption charges.

“There was an old lady—I know her quite well—she is very religious and she wept when she heard the news,” the newspaper seller told me. “But there were others who said they were relieved he was dead and that the world is a better place. To be honest, the news is now much more focussed on Egypt. There’s so much happening here,” he said. “Even this scandal with the Moroccan singer, with the pictures taken by her boyfriend, didn’t get the attention it would usually get. In normal times, people would have been talking about that for days.”

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